The sisters, Kiranjot and Taranjot Matharoo, better known as Kiran and Jyoti and residents of Toronto, appear in the video apologising to Nigerian oil tycoon Femi Otedola and his family.

Kiranjot and Taranjot Matharoo, better known as Kiran and Jyoti, apologised for their actions in a video posted by a website in Nigeria.(Instagram)

Two glamorous Indo-Canadian sisters, detained in Nigeria on charges linked to extortion and cyberbullying, have apologised for their actions in a video posted by a website in the African country.

The sisters, Kiranjot and Taranjot Matharoo, better known as Kiran and Jyoti and residents of Toronto, appear in the video apologising to Nigerian oil tycoon Femi Otedola and his family.

They were arraigned in a Lagos court on December 23 and remanded to custody, according to reports in the Nigerian media. The local media alleged they operated a “notorious” website Naijagistlive, which featured salacious gossip about the private lives of prominent Nigerians, and insinuated it was a platform for blackmail.

In the video, Jyoti reads out a statement from a cellphone, in which she says, “The intention was not to hurt anyone or to be malicious. The intention was not to extort anyone.” She also asserted, “We haven’t received any money from this website.”

The Matharoo sisters spent time in Jaipur during their visit to India in 2015 and hung out at a luxury hotel there.
(Matropolitan blog)

Politics Nigeria alleged the sisters got into trouble after Otedola, an oil billionaire, filed a complaint against them.

While the scandal has roiled Nigeria in recent days, it also received attention in Canada. Reports in the Canadian media said the government is providing “consular assistance” to the sisters.

The sisters appear to have modelled themselves after America’s Kardashian clan, according to their posts on Instagram and Flickr. They seem to have maintained a jet-setting lifestyle, travelling to the beach resort of Nassau in the Bahamas, Las Vegas, New York, Paris and Lagos, and even posing in front of the Taj Mahal in Agra.

That trip to India in the summer of 2015 also took them to Ludhiana, New Delhi and Jaipur, where they posed poolside at a luxury hotel.

The Matharoo sisters in India in 2015.
(Matropolitan blog)

The sisters have a sizeable social media presence, with more than 50,000 followers between the two on Instagram, where they regularly posted images of themselves.

They also chronicled their chic life on a blog, Matropolitan. Those accounts remain online though the last posts on their blog date back to December 9, just before their legal wrangle in Lagos.